A little under a week later, Lyn ‘scrounges up’ a little over two pounds of metal, and I just about faint. You could make a national treasure with this, if you knew a blacksmith. Of course, I don’t know a blacksmith; not counting apprentices I think there’s only two in the whole city, and both work directly for the king. I have no idea where Lyn got this, and I don’t plan on asking.

The metal is worked into a thin, squarish slab which I have opted to hide underneath my armor as I nervously transport it across the city to Theodora and Margarete. To even see that I have the metal at all, someone would have to undo my entire outfit. Stealing it should be impossible, noticing it should be just as impossible, and yet I’m filled with heart-hammering stress for the entire walk. Most nobles would struggle to buy this much metal, let alone get the authorization to own it in the first place. Lyn just gave it to me, no questions asked.

Which is not to say there were no questions answered. I told her about working for Penelope and what we were doing together. Revenants, immortality research, my fear that the Mistwatcher consumes and destroys us after death… we talked about a lot. My musclehead mom was all sorts of excited, concerned, and confused by the things I told her, which I think is what convinced her to go the extra mile. Regardless, I have an insane amount of metal now and I need to deliver it safely. That means no detours and no risks, a promise to myself that I almost immediately break when I feel someone die within the range of my soul sense.

I’ve been getting increasingly spooked about my theory that there is no afterlife, and as a result I’ve taken to collecting as many human souls as I can, at least when they happen to die nearby. Not eating them, not making them Revenants, just… storing them. It seems like the right thing to do. Besides, it feels quite nice having so many souls floating around inside me. I’m afraid I’ll eventually run out of room, though, and signs are pointing to that being very possible. Souls don’t really take up space the same way everything else does, but they really seem to hate being in the same spot as one another. Sooner or later, they aren’t going to fit, and then I’ll have to figure out what to do with them all.

I breathe a sigh of relief as the dead soul I’ve been sensing comes into view. It’s far from the only soul nearby, but it looks like I’m not interposing myself into the middle of a fight. A group of homeless beggars sit together in an alleyway, some chatting softly while others rest. The corpse is an older man, his clothes tattered and body thin. He seems to have died in his sleep, perhaps to starvation, perhaps to disease, or perhaps to a wound he foolishly kept hidden. I have no way to know and no reason to care. Walking down the alleyway like I own it, I scoop up the soul with a tentacle as I pass by and continue on my way. I don’t think any of the others in the group realize he is dead, and I don’t bother to inform them. They’ll find out soon enough, and I don’t want to be connected with the event when they do.

With that detour out of the way, I eventually make it to Penelope’s research building, letting myself in with my key. It’s the first time I’ve ever even owned a key, but I’m not worried about it. I’m hardly in the habit of losing track of anything that’s mine; I’ve kept Rosco safe for around a decade! The basement door is locked and designed in such a way that opening it is exceptionally loud. This serves as an early-warning sign for our Revenants to hide themselves in case someone unexpected comes snooping.

I feel them move to do so, hopping into action and hiding in the alcoves we prepared in advance as I head down the stairs. Opening the last door into our workshop proper, I need only wait for a single beat of silence before my favorite Revenant drops from her hiding spot above the door.

“Mom!” Vitamin cheers, nearly knocking the wind out of me as I quickly turn to catch her. “You’re back! We missed you!”

I give her a big squeeze, tickling her soul enough to elicit a giggling fit.

“Sorry, Vitamin!” I say, ending the hug by tossing her lightly into the air. She produces a happy shriek, doing a flip before landing on her feet. “I’ve been busy training. The hunter’s guild has really been putting us through the paces this week. A bunch of teams have gone missing since those Hiverock orbs dropped, so…”

“You should just quit the hunter’s guild,” Margarete opines, emerging from the freezer room where Penelope stored the corpses before they were people.

The former Nawra woman is still in an old man’s body, Penelope having decided to wait before buying too many corpses at once. I can’t say I disapprove of the caution, though according to Penelope the Revenant has been increasingly irritable as time goes on… except when she’s around me.

“I’m not quitting the hunter’s guild,” I insist. “Hunting monsters is my best source of souls, and I need to be stronger.”

“I know, I know. Just… stay safe, please,” Margarete demands, looking away with a scowl. “If you die, my whole family dies with you.”

I tap my chest.

“They’re safe, don’t worry. I don’t plan on biting off more than I can chew.”

She snorts.

“Neither did I. I mean it, I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you, Vita. Anyway… Theodora, get out here! She won’t bite!”

I start undoing the straps on my armor as Theodora emerges from her hiding spot, her face a disturbing mix of awe and terror that sets me on edge. The shard I put within each of the Revenants fused to their soul, and as time goes on that fusion becomes more and more seamless. I can’t even tell what part I added to Vitamin anymore; there is no real distinction between her soul and my shard that remains. Likewise, the shard I put in Margarete is close to indistinguishable, only pulsing when I give her orders… which I’ve hardly had any need or cause to do. Theodora’s soul is not so seamlessly mixed. She’s both cognisant of and firmly resistant to my tamperings, my soul shard integrating with her very slowly. It’s integrating nonetheless, however, and every time I’ve come to visit her she has been less confrontational.

“Vita,” Theodora greets me, nodding slightly.

I nod back, stripping off my armor to pull out the metal slab I’ve lugged all this way.

“Hey, Theodora. I finally got what you needed. Is this enough?”

Her eyes go wide and she staggers over to me so quickly she almost trips. She grabs the precious mineral from my hands, holding it reverently. Margarete crowds around as well, letting out a low whistle.

“Holy shit. How did you get this much?” she asks.

“This… this will be plenty, Vita,” Theodora breathes, clearly in a bit of shock. “I could have made do with a bare fraction of this, but… well, we’ll certainly be able to keep ourselves safe from detection now. Margarette, shall we…?”

“Yeah!” Margarete agrees. “You dust what we need, I’ll prep the rest of the mixture.”

I smile a little, happy to see them getting along. I doubt Theodora is completely cured of trauma or anything, but the two of them have plenty to bond over and, for obvious reasons, plenty in common. They both seem to genuinely enjoy the research as well.

“What are you guys doing?” I ask as Theodora starts casting a spell. She points a finger towards the metal and shears off a small corner of it, disintegrating it to barely visible filings.

“We’re making ink,” she answers. “Metal-infused ink. It’s the same principle behind my tattoos, but we can apply them to the building itself.”

“So we’ll be safe?”

“As safe from magical detection as any place really can be,” Theodora confirms. “Though none of this will stop people from just walking through the front door, if they’re suspicious.”

“I can still feel what goes on down here when I’m outside, though.”

“You’re an animancer,” Theodora answers dismissively. “We don’t have any idea how animancy works yet. But we will. Until then, as long as there aren’t any animancers willing to tell the Church about us, we should be fine. When I say we’re safe from magical detection, I mean we’re safe from detection of magic. No one will be able to tell we’re casting spells down here, and that’s the important part.”

“Well, that’s really good then! And it looks like we have a lot of extra metal?”

“We’ll have an insane amount of extra metal,” Margarete confirms. “Enough to experiment quite a bit with. This is really, really great, Vita. Again, how did you even get this?”

“Grandma’s a famous metal thief,” Vitamin answers, peering over curiously as the two metamancers work. “She’s the coolest. Speaking of experiments, I was wondering if we could try something, mom.”

I turn her way, raising an eyebrow.

“Oh yeah? What’s up?”

“What if you gave me more of your soul shards?”

Oh? That’s an interesting idea. Some part of me thinks it’s doable, but…

“...I’m a little worried about that messing with your head more than necessary, Vitamin.”

“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing,” she agrees, holding her arms up at me until I lift her onto my shoulders. “But you know how when you eat soulstuff, you kinda… dissolve it first? It’s just raw power at that point, it doesn’t hold any aspect of the original soul’s personality or temperament or whatever. I’m thinking… what if you momma-bird for me? Chew a bit, then barf into my spirit.”

Huh… would that work? The question would be whether or not I can apply it to a soul that’s already in a body. Hmm… no, that’s not the question. Vitamin is my Revenant. I can just take her out of that body, mess with her soul there, then put it back.

“...I think it might work, but do you really want to risk it?” I ask.

She shrugs.

“If we mess up and I end up becoming more like you, that’s still a win in my book. You’re the best!”

Aww, she’s just so cute! Welp, time to rip her soul out.

I pick Vitamin up off my shoulders to hold her like a baby, reaching in a tentacle to remove her. Her body goes limp. Meanwhile, I pull a shard out of my own soul like I would when making a Revenant. It feels like such a natural process to me I barely even question it most of the time, but for curiosity’s sake I stare inward at my soul as I do it. Like other people, the inside of my soul’s core is a complex maze, snaking off in directions alien to my normal senses. Unlike other people, I seem to have a few sections of my soul that lack any such complexity. There, the mind-boggling pathways and structures are instead a single pattern, complex but all-pervasive as it repeats through a mass of extra-concentrated soulstuff. It’s from this part of my spirit that I take shards, and as soon as I do my soul fills in the gap without issue.

Rather than stick the shard in whole, though, I crush it to pieces, destroying it as if I was planning to reintegrate it into myself. Instead, I let Vitamin’s soul absorb it, and to my surprise it does so, quite greedily. Just to test again I crush another shard and try to feed it to a non-Revenant soul, but as I suspected it doesn’t take. So Revenants can absorb soul power too? Or just my Revenants?

Either way, Vitamin’s soul gets a bit less mini, and when I put her back into her body she grins, flexing her thin, pale figure.

“Hey, I feel better! Did it work?”

“It did, yeah,” I confirm. “The power doesn’t come from nowhere, but it’s handy to know.”

“I haven’t been spending my time doing nothing, you know,” Vitamin says, hopping down from my arms. “I’ve been training too! But no matter what I do, my soul doesn’t grow like Remus’s memories say it should.”

Oh, so she does have Remus’s memories. I’m not sure if I should ask about it. Penta was always cagey about Penelope’s memories, and I always got the impression it was for reasons beyond not wanting to piss Penelope off by sharing them. Still, I’ll see if I can steal some of her training tips.

“Has your soul been growing at all?” I ask.

“Not that I can tell.”

I frown, moving my attention deep inside her spirit. She’s right; if anything, her soul might have gotten a little smaller before I added a bit to it. Not much, but a little. I look at Theodora and Margarete as well, and sure enough they both seem ever so slightly weaker than the last time I was here. It’s not enough that I would have noticed without looking for it, but… it’s definitely there.

“Shit,” I murmur. “You guys degrade.”

Margarete looks up with surprise while Theodora grimaces.

“I was afraid of that,” the tattooed woman grumbles. “It wouldn’t make sense if we didn’t. We don’t eat, we don’t drink… where’s the energy that sustains our bodies coming from? The only things I can think of that could be powering us are ambient magical energy from the air— which we don’t seem to be absorbing at all— or we’re burning our own souls.”

Vitamin and Margarete share a concerned look.

“Nawra burn their souls for energy when outside a body, but we degraded much faster when we were alive. Surely there’s something else to it?”

“Perhaps whatever Vita does to us is simply more efficient than how the Nawra were made,” Theodora hypothesizes. “If the theory that you were artificial bioweapons is true, it could be a failure of your creator, or even an outright intentional design flaw.”

“That’s a good point,” Margarete murmurs. “Plus, Revenants can be naturally-occuring, and they don’t degrade as quickly as Nawra do… although they also try to kill every living thing they come across, so perhaps their situation isn’t one-to-one applicable to ours.”

“Maybe Revenants kill to stay alive,” I point out. “If your souls are constantly degrading, and the way to fix that is with more soulstuff, well… the solution is to go out and find some souls.”

“And do what with them? Can natural Revenants ‘digest’ like you can?” Vitamin asks. “I’m pretty sure we can’t. So how would they eat the souls?”

We’re all silent for a while as the questions sink in. It’s a bit unsettling how little I understand my own abilities, but… I suppose that’s part of why we made this place.

“Well, I’m definitely not leaving the hunter’s guild,” I grumble. “I’ve got to feed all of you now! The good news is that you don’t seem to degrade very fast. It’s been a week and I wouldn’t have even noticed if Vitamin hadn’t made me look for it. You want me to give you all a little extra for now?”

“Yes, please,” Margarete answers immediately.

“...No thank you,” Theodora murmurs.

I frown at her as I prep a shard for Margarete.

“You sure? You’re going to have to eat eventually.”

She shakes her head.

“We shouldn’t just assume that. We’ll do this properly. I’ll volunteer to see what happens if we don’t... eat.”

It’s pretty obvious that Theodora just doesn’t want me to stick any more animancy voodoo inside her, but I nod anyway. She does have a point. I grab Margarete and quickly rip her soul out, sprinkling crushed shard on it like a rich asshole tossing crumbs to pigeons before chucking her back in her body. She blinks, slightly frazzled. I guess I probably should have warned her first.

“Anyway, there’s your metal, ladies,” I say, grabbing my armor and starting to put it back on. Margarete quickly scurries over to help me with it. I never asked for that, but… well, I guess I don’t mind. I let her do it. “Do any of you know where Penelope is?”

“I think she went back to the hunter’s guild earlier,” Margarete answers, finishing up the last few straps.

That’s my destination, then. I give Vitamin one last goodbye squeeze and soul-tickle before returning up the stairs, triple-checking that everything is locked up. The walk back to the guild from here is long and boring; I think Penelope has ended up skipping it more than once, just sleeping with the Revenants as they experimented long into the night. It turns out that Revenants never feel any desire to sleep, but they can if they choose, sending their soul into a state of stasis not unlike how they are when trapped inside my body.

Eventually, however, I approach the hunter’s guild, and I’m immediately worried. I feel Penelope’s soul in the medical ward rather than our room, and she’s surrounded by three Remus-level hunters. Another soul that I assume to be the patient is next to her, and it gives me the shivers. I hurry inside, quickly confirming my suspicions. Three worried-looking hunters surround Penelope as she treats a near-skeletal young woman who happens to be missing all four of her limbs and most of her soul.

Most of her soul. I’ve never seen anything like it. What should be a round sphere has been reduced to jagged, craggy chunks, each barely hanging onto each other. How is this woman even alive? I can see how her soul is supposed to look, the present bits hinting at the whole like a half-finished puzzle. This was once a bright red soul with the force of a pounding waterfall. Now it’s dark and barely a trickle, so weak that one of my starving siblings would be a better meal. Even if it was incredibly strong, however, the way it’s been mutilated… it disturbs me in a way that even her quadriplegia can’t match.

I approach. I can’t help myself. It’s the kind of horror I can’t look away from. One of the super-strong hunters lifts a hand, barring my advance. He’s a tall man with a sword on his hip, reminding me somewhat of a much younger version of Remus.

“Please stay back, miss,” he says. “Don’t crowd the biomancer.”

“Take your own fucking advice,” Penelope grumbles without looking up.

“Penelope, it’s me,” I say. “Can I see something?”

“Hmm? Oh, Vita. Yes, by all means. Just stay out of my way.”

The other hunters glance at each other and let me through. Nobody questions a biomancer in a medical ward, except maybe another biomancer. I circle around to the other side of the comatose body, pulling up a chair and carefully, oh so carefully, sending a tentacle in to prod at the broken soul. It’s so weak I almost chip a piece off even from casually brushing it. I didn’t even know a soul could get damaged from incidental contact. I can remove this effortlessly. ...I don’t, of course, but I can.

“Leave us, please,” Penelope says, turning to the other three hunters. “You’re distracting me.”

They look quite irritated at that, but that’s Penelope for you. The one who stopped me has a soft, white soul that makes me think about a cake full of swords. Dangerous, yet fluffy and sweet outside that. I like him immediately, though I can’t say the same for his two teammates. A short, dark-skinned man scowls my way with a soul so hot I suspect he’s either got a thermomancy talent, a bad temper, or both. The third hunter and only woman of the trio glares at me with thin eyes, but I don’t get the impression that it’s personal; it’s just her face. Her soul, though, is like a dark whirlpool, a bitter pit of power and resentment. How did such a nice-seeming man get stuck with two nasty grumps like these?

“Is it alright if we wait outside?” the white-souled guy asks.

“You’re welcome to,” Penelope grunts. “But I’m not going to be waking her up to interrogate her any time soon. I will need at least a day to get food and water into her system before large-scale biomancy is even remotely safe.”

I can tell that’s a lie, but he nods anyway and the three of them depart. Penelope starts waving her fingers around, and soon I hear that telltale dampening of sound that I recognize as a silence bubble.

“Since when can you cast this?” I ask, impressed.

“Since yesterday,” Penelope grunts. “Though I technically don’t have a kynamancy license, so let’s make this quick. You see something odd?”

I nod.

“Yeah, her soul’s been fucked up like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Let me guess, you can’t wake her up even if you wanted to?”

Penelope snorts.

“Ugh. Damn your lie-sense. You’re correct, of course. Medically, she’s very weak but not deathly starving. I got her fluids up so it should be safe to wake her. She just… won’t.”

“Yeah, I’m surprised she’s even alive. I’ve never seen a soul like this. But I think… it’s repairing itself.”

I hadn’t stopped peering at the woman’s soul while everyone else talked, and sure enough I do see the soul regrowing… which hardly seems fair. My Revenants lose soul strength over time, but living people gain it. It makes sense, though, and matches what I know. The soul helps the body grow if it’s stronger, and the body helps the soul grow when it’s stronger. Both body and soul are horridly weak in this woman, but her soul is at the clear disadvantage.

“Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if a soul this full of holes can’t even think,” I continue. “It barely feels human like this.”

Penelope nods, thinking.

“When do you think she’ll wake up?”

I shrug.

“No idea. At this rate her soul won’t be whole again for months, but… she might not need the whole thing to be awake?”

“Can you speed up the repair somehow?”

“Uh, I don’t think so. Unless you want me to kill her first.”

Penelope hums thoughtfully. Oh shit, she’s seriously thinking about it.

“That was a joke,” I clarify.

“Doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea, but you’re right; it’s probably not worth the risk in this case.”

“I can try something I just learned today?” I hedge. I don’t think living things can absorb soul dust but she’s halfway in the grave anyway. Penelope shakes her head, though.

“Not if you aren’t confident in it. A slow but steady recovery is much preferable to experimenting on a patient.”

“Who is this lady anyway?” I ask. “What the hell happened to her?”

“She is a hunter named Fulvia,” Penelope informs me. “Her team was sent to one of the Hiverock orb-drop sites. They were presumed all dead, but…”

Penelope gestures to the patient.

“You win the bet, by the way. It was eggs. Alen’s team found her alive, held captive by one of the things that hatched from them. It was reportedly sapient.”

I shudder. Holy shit. Just the idea of another soul-eating monster running around fills me with dread. There’s just something that feels imminently more threatening about that than anything else I’ve ever come across. I hope I never have to get anywhere near those things.

“You’d best prepare yourself, by the way,” Penelope continues. “I’d give ten-to-one odds that you’re going to be part of the team that goes after it.”

...Of course.